Ever wonder how Society of Mind came about? Of course you do. One of the key ideas of Society of Mind [1] is that at some range of abstraction levels, the brain’s software is a bunch of asynchronous agents. Agents are simple but a properly organized society of them results in what we call “mind.” […]

I’m trying to find a better simulator than Breve for robots and 3D physics world creation. I have been examining the Webots simulation environment. It seems pretty useful since I could write controllers in C++ and it comes with several robot models out of the box. And I like the scene graph (or “scene tree” […]

Hyping Nonsense: What Happens When Artificial Intelligence Turns On Us?

The user(s) behind the G+ account Singularity 2045 made an appropriately skeptical post today about the latest Machines-versus-Humans “prediction,” specifically an article “What Happens When Artificial Intelligence Turns On Us” about a new book by James Barrat. As S2045 says: Don’t believe the hype. It is utter nonsense to think AI or robots would ever […]

This is a personal postmortem (aka retrospective), not a report on the world at-large. What Went Right I accomplished several things of a wider diversity than I did in 2012, particularly new-to-me activities. Highlights: Sky-dived for the first time Went outdoor top-rope rock climbing for the first time Submitted two artificial intelligence papers to conferences/symposia, […]

One way to increase the intelligence of a robot is to train it with a series of missions, analogous to the missions (aka levels) in a video game. In a developmental robot, the training would not be simply learning—its brain structure would actually change. Biological development shows some extremes that a robot could go through, […]

Whenever a machine or moist machine (aka animal) comes up with a solution, an observer could imagine an infinite number of alternate solutions. The observed machine, depending on its programming, may have considered many possible options before choosing one. In any case, we could imagine a 2D or 3D (or really any dimensionality) mathematical space […]

At the AAAI 2013 Fall Symposia (FSS-13) 1 2, I realized that I was not prepared to explain certain topics quickly to those who are specialists in various AI domains and/or don’t delve into philosophy of mind issues. Namely I am thinking of enactivism and embodied cognition. But something even easier (or so I thought) […]

Recently I voyaged with my girlfriend to the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest near a black lagoon named Challuacocha. To get there we flew to a miniscule airport in the town of Coca where everyone disembarking was kept locked in a hallway before being let out into the blinding sun to be accosted by various guides, none […]

As part of my effort towards developmental systems for cognitive architectures, I’ve been trying to beat some sense into an Alife simulator. I’ve used the Breve simulator in the past, and although it’s no longer supported, it still works fine. My existing Anibots code uses Breve [1]—which in turn uses Open Dynamics Engine—as the physical […]

On “Humanoid robots as ‘The Cultural Other’: are we able to love our creations?”

I just noticed a recently published Springer article titled “Humanoid robots as “The Cultural Other”: are we able to love our creations?” by Min-Sun Kim and Eun-Joo Kim [1] which cites my own article “Would You Still Love Me If I Was A Robot?“[2]. At the moment I do not have access to the full […]